The Benefits of a Close Relationship With Your Marketing Agency
It’s no secret that the higher education landscape grows more competitive by the day. COVID-19 lockdowns. Declining birth rates. Troubling cultural narratives questioning the worth of college educations. That collective and figurative kick in the academic pants has left colleges scrambling to maximize their digital recruitment efforts while staying within razor sharp budgets.
Mad Genius knows the academic market and what it means to deliver measurable results within budgetary restraints. We know because we’ve done it, many times. We’ve learned a lot about the space over the years, but perhaps the most important truth is this: a close relationship with a trusted marketing agency will help your college get the most bang for your marketing buck. It’s one thing to pay someone to help you find success, but it’s quite another to have a friend at your side.
Let’s explore a few key benefits of cultivating a close relationship with your marketing agency.
An Agency That Really Gets You
A great agency invests time to truly appreciate you. They take the time to understand what your college is all about, and not just its programs and target demographics. Its spirit. Its beating heart. What it means to live and breathe your campus and your town. They become your new BFF.
Such an in-depth comprehension of your college’s needs allows a marketing agency to become more than an external hire but an integral part of your team.
- By developing an extensive awareness of your college’s unique values, goals, and audience preferences, your agency can optimize ad placements, messaging, and targeting parameters.
- This level of precision ensures that your recruitment ads reach the right people at the right time and in the right way.
- By understanding what doesn’t work, your agency can develop a rich negative keyword list that further enhances targeting accuracy and cost efficiency. This means your dollars are not spent on demographics you have already reached, like existing students.
Get an Agency (BFF) That’s a Ready for Anything
Stuff happens. There will inevitably come a time when your college needs to steer their current campaign in a different direction. New problems to solve, different issues to focus on, more or less money to spend—whatever the reason, you need an agency ready to jump in and embrace the new adventure.
When you’ve developed a close relationship with your agency BFF, they can anticipate many of the moves you’ll need to make, and the direction you’ll most likely want to go. Your agency can quickly pivot and make real-time changes to your digital recruitment campaigns. With an intimate familiarity with your college’s culture and brand, communication and coordination become seamless, swift, and ready to adapt to change as it comes. This agility enables the agency to respond to emerging trends, audience behavior shifts, or changes in enrollment goals, ensuring your campaigns remain effective, efficient, and less expensive.
Find Yourself a Fortune Telling Agency (BFF)
Turns out your BFF also reads tarot and dabbles in astronomy and, as much as you don’t believe in such things, they’re pretty darn good at forecasting what’s coming around the bend.*
The longer you know someone, the better you know them. Years of collaboration with a marketing agency results in a wealth of historical data and insights into your college’s marketing efforts. This knowledge base empowers the agency to perform accurate forecasting and provide valuable guidance on meeting growth goals. By leveraging this experience and data, the agency can optimize your campaigns, refine targeting strategies, and allocate resources more effectively, thereby saving your college money.
A trusted agency can quickly pivot to make real-time changes to your digital recruitment campaigns.
Make Sure Your Agency (BFF) Has Talented Friends
(Editor’s note: Mad Genius is aware that this BFF metaphor—which probably seemed like a good idea at first—is straining under its own weight. Let’s see if our writer can stick the landing.)
Your BFF has friends, great friends. Talented, creative friends, and they like to be helpful. These friends are willing and able to lend you a hand when you need something outside the norm, whether it’s a video, some copy, a new landing page—whatever.
When you hire a full-service agency, those friends are around and available all the time, which means you have access to a diverse range of expertise under one roof. Collaborating closely with creative teams allows for streamlined coordination and faster campaign adjustments (Editor’s note: Like pivoting away from failed metaphors). If your enrollment goals shift, the creative team can swiftly fine-tune the media plan in sync with production, ensuring seamless and cost-effective adjustments.
BFFs for Life (We Don’t Mean That Metaphorically)
There are many advantages that come with having a BFF-agency, especially when it comes to the fast-paced, ever-changing world of digital recruitment efforts. From gaining an in-depth understanding of your college’s needs, to benefiting from real-time campaign adjustments, historical data insights, and precise targeting, the benefits are manifold. (Get close enough, and you may hear stories about the crazy blog writer they fired because of his unhealthy fixation with and poor execution of metaphor.) The bottom line is this: by collaborating closely with a marketing agency, colleges can save money on digital recruitment ads while achieving their enrollment goals more efficiently.
Reach out to Mad Genius today to embrace the power of a close partnership and unlock the potential for cost-effective and impactful marketing strategies. You can schedule a free, 30-minute consultation with an expert in digital recruitment campaigns for all types of higher educational institutions.
*Disclaimer: Mad Genius does not practice any mystic arts to deduce media strategy. (At least, not anymore.)